Newspoll: 51-49 to Labor

The latest fortnightly Newspoll delivers the same two-party preferred result as ReachTEL, adding to an impression of a slow and steady deflation of Labor’s post-budget bounce.

Stephen Murray tweets that Newspoll has come in at 51-49 in favour of Labor, down from 52-48 a fortnight ago. Both parties are unchanged on the primary vote, the Coalition at 40% and Labor at 34%. Labor’s missing point on two-party preferred is down to a two-point drop on an excessive reading last time for the Greens, who are now at 11%. Bill Shorten has recovered the narrowest of leads as preferred prime minister, leading 40-39 after trailing 41-37 last time, and his personal ratings are solidly improved on the previous poll, with satisfaction up three to 39% and dissatisfaction down four to 40%. Tony Abbott’s ratings are effectively unchanged at 36% satisfaction (steady) and 55% dissatisfaction (down one). The poll also finds 77% support for laws requiring visitors returning from certain areas to prove they weren’t in contact with terrorists.

UPDATE (Essential Research): Labor retains its 52-48 lead from Essential Research, with both major parties down a point on the primary vote – the Coalition to 39%, Labor to 37% – and the Greens up one to 10%. A question on “Australia’s best Treasurer” – recently, at least – has Peter Costello beating Paul Keating 30% to 23%, with Wayne Swan on 8%, Joe Hockey on 5% and 35% opting for don’t know. Bernard Keane in Crikey notes that Costello “benefited from great ambivalence from Greens voters, 52% of whom declared ‘don’t know’ rather than endorse the more progressive Keating”, and Swan stole more votes from Labor supporters than Hockey did from the Coalition. The poll also found 38% of respondents rating Chinese investment as good for the economy versus 36% who said it wasn’t. The remaining questions dealt with social class, which 79% of respondents agreed existed, 31%, 49% and 2% respectively nominating themselves as working, middle and upper. Most interestingly, association of the parties with particular classes has increased since April last year, 41% associating Labor with the working class and 47% the Liberals with the upper class, up from 30% and 40%.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

910 comments on “Newspoll: 51-49 to Labor”

Comments Page 18 of 19
1 17 18 19
  1. zoidlord@855

    @bemused/853

    Why do you bother people?

    Go and hide in one of your corners.

    So called Labor supporter.

    Perhaps you would care to explain the connection between Australian Politics and Polling and an outage on an American cable network?

    Please desist from putting irrelevant twitter garbage all over this blog.

  2. [zoidlord@855
    @bemused/853
    Why do you bother people?
    Go and hide in one of your corners.
    So called Labor supporter.

    Perhaps you would care to explain the connection between Australian Politics and Polling and an outage on an American cable network?
    Please desist from putting irrelevant twitter garbage all over this blog.]

    To be fair, guytaur is a far worse offender for posting “irrelevant twitter garbage” here.

  3. Good to know the FWO is doing its job, but I’d love to have been a fly on the wall of the enterprise bargaining negotiations between the SDA and REd Rooster back then.

    [The Fair Work Ombudsman first proposed the Deed to the company after identifying a problem with the interpretation of an enterprise bargaining agreement in 2009.

    The 2009 agreement was negotiated by Red Rooster with the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association on behalf of most, but not all, franchise outlets.

    However, when it investigated a number of complaints from Red Rooster franchise employees in 2011, the Fair Work Ombudsman found the pay rates in the agreement were below those of the Fast Food Industry Award 2010.]
    https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/24829084/red-rooster-short-changes-staff/

    Other retail fast food outlets such as Dominoes and Maccas have also been caught up the self audit audit. Were their enterprise agreements also negotiated with the SDA?

  4. quite by accident the other day, I came across an interesting coincidence. Here in Australia we use the term ‘Dorothy Dixer’ to describe a question designed to permit a person on one’s own side of party politics to talk about what he or she wanted to talk about during Question Time. This derived from the name of an American advice columnist who, apparently, made up her own questions. Classic sockpuppetry!

    Interestingly though, there was an American social reformer by the name of Dorothea Dix who seems, for her time (1802-1887), to have been an insistently worthy woman. She worked to educate the poor and then went on to improve provision for the mentally ill and prisoners.

    Amazing what you find out by accident!

  5. Why should guytaur and zoidlord be attacked when everyone , at some time, pops in a reference which is not directly related to polling or politics. I am a serial offender in this regard, but the habit is, IMO what makes pb into a community of interest rather than a dull series.

  6. [ Peter van Onselen @vanOnselenP · 8h
    On #PVOnewshour I’m chatting national security with Justice Minister Michael Keenan & budget with assistant shadow treasurer Dr Andrew Leigh]

    I can’t remember who it was, but on twitter recently, soon as Abbott started arking up about terror this and beheading that, they tweeted that the major parties had their lines for the next two years: the coalition on terror this and beheading that, and Labor on health and education. And expect to see this until the next election.

    And so it begins with the coalition sending out its justice minister to an interview with the shadow asst treasurer. Why are the Liberals afraid to talk about the economy and the budget? This is supposed to be one of their areas of strengths, yet they are continuing to throw all that under the bus by taking to their uber area of strength in national security. Bizarre.

  7. Yesterday I posted a counterfactual here, exploring what the consequences might have been had Australian governments effectively suppressed almost all private use of motor vehicles on urban roads in about 1960.

    http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2014/08/25/newspoll-51-49-to-labor-3/?comment_page=9/#comment-2041733

    While there were some very obvious benefits — reductions in road trauma and death being the most obvious likely consequence, along with cleaner air, less pollution of soils with lead, less urban sprawl, probably a trading surplus in oil, lower GHGs, I haven’t been able to come up with any serious costs. I’m sure there must be some.

    Maybe the 1960s would have been more boring. Those car holidays we went on would have been out of the question. I’d have gone on fewer family picnics.

    Maybe Australians would have done better in international cycling but suffered more bike injuries. Casualty would have been filled with people who had fallen off bikes. I imagine armed robberies would have been rarer, and bikie gangs a lot less scary. Maybe we’d never have made Mad Max. Thousands of highway patrol police would have been out of jobs. Maybe Roger Rogerson would never have amounted to anything.

    Maybe there would have been no market for the Hardie Ferodi 1000. No Brock v Moffatt grudge matches and boys obsessing over cars. Maybe taxi drivers would have made a fortune.

    I’m sure there would have to have been a bigger downside than this.

  8. Sometimes the political and polling links make less sense than the other links. Many Twitter links are no more than personal opinions of bloggers without any way of testing the information in the links.

    That’s why they invented the scroll bar.

  9. [Why should guytaur and zoidlord be attacked]

    Because in an online environment there will always be fellow commenters who don’t feel they’re contributing unless they’re attacking other commenters.

    Who the hell knows what their motivation is. Truly bunny boiler stuff however.

  10. Abbott’s rorting of expenses (once again) seems to have been dropped by the media, as has the really big story of who leaked it and the inquisition and retribution I am sure is in play within the LNP this week. If this happened in the ALP the media would be talking destablisation and pending leadership challenges. Shorten played it very well – let them rip themselves to shreds – but he should let a backbencher join the dots between this, hockey’s car and overnight expenses when staying at his wife’s property, pyne and other’s use of air force planes on commercial routes, and NSW ICAC funding. the words “these wealthy and privileged men seem to be in this to take as much from taxpayers they can” would not be inappropriate.

    great start to parliament resuming.

    the solution? – abbott to declare war on ISIL and to answer all questions about any topic with “can’t comment on that due to security concerns /operations”?

  11. lizzie:

    I learned to ignore / scroll! 😉

    Btw, hope you’re doing okay with everything post Ken. I’ve noticed you aren’t around so much for dawn patrol these days and assume it’s because you don’t have that extra pair of hands to help with your mum?

  12. Fran Barlow: The major cost, I imagine, would be lower overall productivity as more time was taken up by transport. This would particularly be the case in regional areas with less population density, where public transport would necessarily run to sparser timetables.

    It would probably have resulted in more urbanisation, as the more efficient transport available in the cities attracted people.

    Cabbies would do very well, too – ahh, you had a vested interest all along!

  13. zoid, davidwh:

    *Gasp*

    You mean a Great Big New Tax to pay for war?!

    😮

    Despite war not being outside the realms of possibility with this govt, I’m still thinking it’s unlikely Abbott would go there. Much easier to frou frou about the margins and talk up the Big I Am than to actually be responsible for troops on the ground in a messy situation.

  14. [Abbott’s rorting of expenses (once again) seems to have been dropped by the media, as has the really big story of who leaked it and the inquisition and retribution I am sure is in play within the LNP this week. If this happened in the ALP the media would be talking destablisation and pending leadership challenges]

    Absolutely. I just complaned to the ABC,as follows. Do the same if youre pissed off.

    http://www.abc.net.au/contact/complain.htm

    I ranted:

    [I was absolutely gobsmacked to find no mention of PM Abbott’s travel claims in Melbourne on this evening’s news.

    Nothing. If this had been a Labor PM, there’d be a story plus follow up on 730pm. Then a Royal Commission!

    Did you lot get stood over by the LNP and back down?

    What an extraordianry failure fromour public broadcaster. And you call yourselves journalists?

    Appalling derelection of your duty to the public. I DO require a response as a taxpayer.

    Yours etc

    Concerned, of Sans Souci

  15. It’s not necessarily a zero-sum game to bomb both the IS and Assad forces in Syria, because the Syrian conflict is most definitely a three-sided one. The problem is that the third side – the “Free Syrian Army”, the Syrian Kurds and others – is a loose coalition with the least military power of the three main factions, and it seems insufficient to ever be able to exercise effective control over the entire country.

  16. and here we go

    http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/abbott-government-has-isis-dossier-as-barack-obama-builds-iraq-coalition-of-the-willing/story-fni0xs61-1227039129794

    the ‘abbott government’ complied the dossier apparently – not the intelligence agencies or the army. the abbott government did it. let’s hope they did a better job of it than the howard government did on weapons of mass destruction and children overboard.

    murdoch media to beat the war drum for days to come and abbott to dismiss all questions as unimportant compared to his churchillian moment (probably more akin to Gallipoli than the battle of Britain). he’s as crazy as Churchill, with the same levels of empathy for others.

  17. Sustainable future@889

    and here we go

    http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/world/abbott-government-has-isis-dossier-as-barack-obama-builds-iraq-coalition-of-the-willing/story-fni0xs61-1227039129794

    the ‘abbott government’ complied the dossier apparently – not the intelligence agencies or the army. the abbott government did it. let’s hope they did a better job of it than the howard government did on weapons of mass destruction and children overboard.

    murdoch media to beat the war drum for days to come and abbott to dismiss all questions as unimportant compared to his churchillian moment (probably more akin to Gallipoli than the battle of Britain). he’s as crazy as Churchill, with the same levels of empathy for others.

    He probably got Joe to count how many of them there were.

    Gotta keep that eleventy calculator busy! 😀

  18. davidwh:

    [Fess I think the chances we will commit F18′s is pretty high but I doubt we will commit to a ground force.]

    Yes, it seems like Iran will be supplying group troops (Quds force) and the West will be supplying air power, which allows both to play to their strengths and to pretend not to notice the involvement of the other.

  19. davidwh:

    In whatever way we get involved in whatever might be happening or might eventuate in the future, it’s unlikely to be clean or without blowback.

  20. watch as the war on ISIL is used to justify taxes, levies, slashing of spending, sale of assetts, and dropping of the PPL fantasy – and the booming deficit. maybe to save money parliament will set less often? ‘Team ‘Straya’ to be used to shut down debate on a range of issues.

  21. Fess I think there will be consequences whatever we do or don’t do. To me it’s a straight forward issue. If we can do something that will help stabilize the situation and allow the Iraq government to get some control back from ISIS we should. However I think any support should be limited to air support.

    If there is no chance the Iraq government can regain some control then there is little point and less hope.

    But I don’t think we can do nothing if we can contribute in a meaningful way. The human atrocities are just too bad to ignore.

    Again but, there are no easy rights and wrongs in the ME.

  22. Abbott and”security” and terrorism
    +___________________________
    It’s clear that the govt want to use the “national danger” meme to help to give Abbott th national figure image and also to help distract the voters

    in fact the crisis in Syria has been extended over recent years by the crazy US policy of helping the anti-Assad forces in Syria…,despite wernings that they were linked with radical islamist forces there

    If the Tea Party Repubs in the US and their Isreali mates had had their way they would have launched a major war on Iran,which might now be a failed state like Libya and Iraq …bth states remain the worst examaples of US policy disasters in the region

    yet Abbott would love to get us involved in a nicekind of war in the Middle East…the Libs thrive on this situation

Comments Page 18 of 19
1 17 18 19

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *